


From The Table In The Corner, They Could See A World Reborn

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:03:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 1_million_words songfic challenge, the song is Empty Chairs at Empty Tables from Les Miserables. Haymitch returns to the Capitol after the rebellion is over and imagines his friends are with him as he revists the old haunts where they planned the rebellion together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From The Table In The Corner, They Could See A World Reborn

_There's a grief that can't be spoken.  
There's a pain goes on and on.  
Empty chairs at empty tables  
Now my friends are dead and gone._

The Capitol Haymitch sees before him isn’t the same place he knows from all those years of Games. This was where he’d sat with a few close friends and allies, Chaff, Finnick, Mags, Wiress, Cecelia, Seeder, Woof. For a moment, he imagines that they are all sat with him now, planning for the future that Panem had previously only dreamed of.

Haymitch raises a glass to Finnick. So often misunderstood as the darling of the Capitol and enjoying all the attention he had received, Haymitch had been one of the few who had ever seen the real Finnick, who wanted to see an end to everything the Capitol was putting them all through. He was unable to help but admire the way Finnick had coped with everything that Snow had thrown at him, managing to keep going and even keeping his sense of humour intact. Haymitch sometimes thought that Finnick put him to shame, but Finnick told him not to think like that. He was doing a good thing now in leading the rebellion, and that was what mattered.

If that rebellion hadn’t been the cause of Finnick’s death among many others, he might even have let himself believe it.

_Here they talked of revolution.  
Here it was they lit the flame.  
Here they sang about `tomorrow'  
And tomorrow never came._

Haymitch raises a glass to Mags. Possibly one of the bravest of them all, she had accepted her likely fate in a way that put the rest of them to shame. She had admitted to everyone but Finnick that she fully intended to die in the arena to help create the tomorrow that he and Annie had previously only dreamed of. Although she had been determined that Finnick would never find out, Haymitch was pretty sure he had some idea of this.

Mags should never have been in the arena. Snow should never have created that situation. Yet Haymitch understood why she had volunteered for Annie, because he would have done the same for Peeta if Peeta’s name had been called.

He often wondered how she did it. As one of the earliest victors, she must have watched more tributes die than Haymitch and Chaff put together (contrary to what a lot of people thought, District 4 was a relatively new addition to the Career districts), and yet she still managed to deal with it without turning to the alcohol in the way Haymitch had done.

She had volunteered to allow Finnick and Annie the chance of a future together. Part of Haymitch was glad that she was never going to find out that that wasn’t going to happen. 

_From the table in the corner  
They could see a world reborn  
And they rose with voices ringing  
I can hear them now!  
The very words that they had sung  
Became their last communion  
On the lonely barricade at dawn._

Haymitch raises a glass to Chaff. Chaff had nailed it that last night before the Quarter Quell when he had made his way to Haymitch’s room for one final drink. How was it that Chaff was the closest friend he had had ever since his Games, and yet it wasn’t until the night before the Quell that he knew the real story behind Chaff’s Games and why he had always refused to let the Capitol rebuild his hand? He’d just accepted that stupid joke about how Chaff didn’t want to be a mutt like the rest of the Capitol’s creations, and never tried to see past it. Now he wondered what else he had never known about Chaff, the man who he would have always described as his best friend. Chaff had been his drinking buddy, the guy he laughed at Effie’s outfits with, the person he sang drinking songs from the districts with and drowned his sorrows with every time either of them watched their tributes die. It is only now that Haymitch realises how much more he was to him.

Chaff had carried around doubts about himself, that he was a coward, ever since the Games when he had saved himself only to find that his district partner had been killed by the mutt he had successfully escaped. These doubts had haunted him right up to the night before the Quarter Quell, when he had finally confided them to Haymitch, and had even been able to drink to the Career tributes who had taunted him about his failure to save his district partner, and to forgive them, understanding that they were pawns in the Games just as much as he was and they had never been the real enemy. He might have believed himself to be a coward, but Chaff was about the strongest person Haymitch had ever known.

_Oh my friends, my friends forgive me  
That I live and you are gone.  
There's a grief that can't be spoken.  
There's a pain goes on and on._

Haymitch raises a glass to Maysilee Donner. The only reason he was even here to join the rebellion in the first place was because she was there to save him from that Career tribute. He’d tried to tell himself afterwards that there was no more he could have done for her, that there were just too many birds for him to have taken on on his own. But it had happened minutes after they had ended their alliance, and he still wondered if maybe he could have saved her if they hadn’t.

He saw her face all the time in her sister, the Mayoress, and in her niece, Katniss’s friend Madge. Haymitch had recognised Madge immediately when she was first eligible to be reaped because she had reminded him so much of Maysilee. The shock had caused him to stumble and fall before vomiting all over Effie Trinket. Haymitch had seen Madge’s look of disgust as that happened, a look he was to observe so many times in the future when he and Madge encountered each other again. Then over time, he began to notice that Madge no longer looked at him with disgust, but rather with – was it pity? Someone had obviously told her the story of his and Maysilee’s Games, and it had changed her view of him. There was a part of Haymitch that wished that whoever had told her hadn’t, because he had found her revulsion easier to deal with. 

It was just the same as he felt every time he looked at himself.

_Phantom faces at the window.  
Phantom shadows on the floor.  
Empty chairs at empty tables  
Where my friends will meet no more._

Haymitch raises a glass to Seeder, the only person who was ever able to calm him and Chaff down when they got too drunk and had started singing the drinking songs too loudly. He drinks to Wiress, one of the smartest people he had ever known and whose expertise had been instrumental in Beetee’s plan to help break the tributes out of the arena. He drinks to Woof, who had really thought he was trying to help when he decided to pretend he was senile in the hope that if he was caught by the Capitol, he’d manage to make them believe he didn’t know anything. Who’d trust the guy who was so gaga he kept trying to eat the poisonous bugs? Those who’d argued that that strategy was only going to put Katniss off him as an ally had been proved right, of course, but Haymitch had to give him credit for trying.

And he raises a glass to Cecelia, who had said every year that she’d been a mentor at the Games that she was petrified that her children would one day be reaped. No one had been able to say anything to reassure her; it was common knowledge that children of victors were reaped too often to be a coincidence, and with Cashmere and Gloss, they had started reaping siblings too. That had been the reason that Cecelia had been so determined to join the rebellion, because it was the only way that she could make sure that her children would never be reaped. In much the same way as Mags, Cecelia had accepted her fate to protect those she loved as well as the Mockingjay.

 

_Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me  
What your sacrifice was for  
Empty chairs at empty tables  
Where my friends will sing no more_

Well, they got their wish. Snow’s gone, the districts have more of a say in the way Panem is run instead of the country being dominated by the autocratic rule of the Capitol. They never did hold that Hunger Games with the children from the Capitol, and now Haymitch has had time to think, he realises that that is for the best. He personally oversaw the destruction of the many pieces of paper with Quarter Quells; there will be no more Quells or any more Games.

And yet Haymitch can take no pleasure in this; there are too many people who are not here to see it. For a moment he imagines Chaff breaking out into one of their old favourite songs, Seeder trying unsuccessfully to calm them down, Cecelia telling him some anecdote about something her children had done, Finnick joking with Mags.

He could not have saved them all; he knows that. But Haymitch will never stop wishing that all his friends were here to see this day.


End file.
